Wasted
by sapphireswimming
Summary: The ghosts have been threatening to waste Danny ever since they met him, but he never thought it would actually happen. Most definitely not for Danny Phantom SG-1. XD


***spoilerishy* Rated for drinking. Also, I should probably make the disclaimer that even though I was a theatre major, I actually have little experience with drunk people, and am perfectly happy to keep things that way. Not that this needed to embody the soul of realism either, though; it's just a silly little thing that ran off on me and Danny Phantom SG-1 will probably hate me for actually writing. X3**

* * *

_Because you should mean what you say and say what you mean.  
Hearing "waste" instead of "kill" is such a horrible thing._

_It was a pet peeve of Liv's and it's now one of mine.  
Down at the end of a very (very!) long line._

_So consider this a gag gift to tide you over,  
Til your gift comes to celebrate this 18th of October._

_Have a very happy birthday (and wimpy week), my friend!  
My congratulations if you make it through this to the end. XD_

* * *

**Wasted**

October 18, 2013

* * *

For the life of him, Danny could not figure out how he had gotten in this mess. Trussed up with nowhere to go and nothing he could do. It was maddening, to say the least. And quite painful, getting blasted again and again. He certainly hadn't missed getting beat up by the ghosts plaguing Amity. He could have done without. It had been quite a while since he had been at any ghost's mercy… but Ember of all people? How had that happened?

The thought was knocked out of him as another pink wave of blasts crashed against his side. He roughly shook his head to get the last remnants of pain out of it, but it served to once again focus his attention on the situation at hand instead of how he had gotten there. That did not matter. What mattered now was what he was going to do next.

Unfortunately, it did not seem like there was much he could do.

Ember had upgraded her guitar—perks of being Skulker's girlfriend—and while the new setting on her knob had seemed innocent enough, the spaghetti like squiggle icon had turned out to be five conjoined ectoplasmic ropes that bound his arms to his side, effectively paralyzing him and rendering him completely vulnerable.

He couldn't even form an ectoblast because with the way his hands had been pinned to his side, the only place he could fire was at himself and despite what his friends said about him, he wasn't quite clueless enough to try _that_.

So he was reduced to wiggle and squirm and twist inside the ropes, forcing out grunts and groans and horrible attempts at puns that even he knew were bad in between each of Ember's attacks.

To keep his mind off the pain he couldn't fight, and to preserve at least some form of dignity in his totally undignified position, he made up his mind to figure out an escape plan. But barring that, and it soon proved impossible to follow the threads of any kind of plan while you had ghostly energy zipping through your skull and knocking those plans to the opposite hemisphere of your brain, he would just come up with something on the fly. Like he always seemed to do. And it generally always worked out in the end.

Which meant that the back up plan was still viable. The back up plan being his normal course of action and Sam couldn't say that he didn't try to come up with a full blown well thought out escape plan this time before jumping straight to the smart mouthing and irritating his enemies with his horribly brilliant puns.

He pulled himself together enough to glare at Ember with two glowing green eyes. "Alright, alright, this game is getting a little one sided, don't you think? Why don't…" he broke off as the rock star strummed halfheartedly at him before canting her head to listen to what he had to say. "Why don't we take a break, switch this up and let me have a swing at the guitar? Or a swing _at_ you _with_ the guitar."

Ember's mouth pressed into a thin line and her eyes blazed at the thought of someone else touching her instrument. She turned the dial and threw a punch at Danny that left his brain doing somersaults in his head until he breathed deeply for a few long moments to let it clear.

"No one," she seethed. "No one touches my guitar except me, dipstick. Just me."

"Got it," he replied, slurring slightly. "Not touching the guitar. It was just a suggestion…"

"A bad one," Ember hissed, her hair flaring up in an agitated flame.

"Yeah," Danny said with a roll of his head. "Cause I have no idea why I would ever want to touch that thing with a ten foot pole. I mean, it's basically pink and," he broke off to indulge in a full body shiver, "I wouldn't be caught dead with it…" He stopped with the sudden realization. "But oh wait… that's right… you are dead."

"It's purple and aqua and for your information, it's perfect," Ember spat at him as she clunked forward in her high heeled skull boots to stare eye to eye with her prisoner. "And you don't have to worry about ever dirtying your hands with it because that's never going to be part of the plan."

Danny glared at her, trying to fit as much venom into his eyes as possible so that the ghost would forget that she was supposed to be pummeling him. Frankly, these fights were a lot better when they hurled insults instead of ectoblasts. Hurt a lot less.

Of course, he was never very good at thinking through his words in the heat of battle and realizing when to keep his big mouth closed.

"Yeah?" he asked. "So what is the plan then? You got me here; now what? You gonna waste me?"

Ember's hand, poised over the taut strings of her instrument, stilled, and she stared at Danny for a long moment. The silence continued to stretch on as the ghost appeared frozen in place, her strange expression unchanging.

"What?" Danny asked, feeling like he was out of the loop of something that he should know.

That idea only intensified as Ember snapped out of it and began to laugh, so long and hard that she doubled over and finally had to lean her guitar against the wall to wipe the tears from her eyes.

Danny felt lost, and his defiant heroic stance didn't seem to be doing much to help his case because every time she seemed to recover and looked at him, she began cracking up all over again like it was the funniest inside joke she'd ever heard.

"What?" he asked again.

"Oh kid," she managed, "you kill me!"

Danny began struggling with his ropes again while she was distracted, grunting out a distracted "Don't you mean you're going to kill me?" which stopped the rocker cold.

She straightened up and stopped laughing. "Why would I kill you?" she asked, and seemed honestly confused at the notion. "You wouldn't be nearly so much fun to mess with if you were a full ghost and didn't have a secret you were trying to hide from everyone. Plus, then you would have a lot more free time and how would we ever be able to get anything done?" she added with a 'duh!' expression coloring her face.

"So no," she said as Danny's pinched features seemed to beg further explanation. "I'm not going to kill you…"

But as she trailed off and the sides of her mouth began to twitch upward, Danny wondered if he would like the alternative much better. "Then what are you going to do?" he asked with a gulp.

In answer, she leaned toward him and smiled.

* * *

Danny came to with a jerk and immediately regretted the sharp movement. His head felt like it was going to split open and as he settled back he realized that he could feel his heart pounding through his veins.

Couldn't feel much else of him, but that was probably a blessing given how bad his head felt and the fact that the last thing he could remember was Ember blasting him with that stupid pink guitar of hers.

Ember—!

He opened his eyes and peered around, but couldn't see her. He blinked a bit in an attempt to make everything a bit less blurry and with momentous effort turned his head to see the rest of the room.

No one else was in it, but the few pieces of furniture— a table, chairs, and what might have been a monstrously hideous couch— were upturned on the floor. The cabinet in the corner was the only thing still standing, but the doors were flung open to reveal the beginning of a trail of trashed bottles that littered the floor.

It looked like the fighting had been pretty intense. He definitely felt like it had been. Felt beat up enough to have been on the losing side of it, though, and given that he was just now waking up he would have assumed that the other guy didn't just give up and retreat after he'd knocked Danny Phantom unconscious. That was when most of his enemies _started_ gloating. It didn't add up that his enemy wasn't here, then.

Or that he didn't remember what had happened. Being tied up and unable to fight back against Ember was the last thing he remembered but he found, when he put one hand over his eyes, that he wasn't tied up anymore.

After a few moments, he tried to push up but his whole body protested and since his hand was sinking far enough into whatever giving surface he was laying on that it was hard to move, he decided to stay where he was since it didn't appear that he was in any immediate danger. Closing his eyes, he relished the peace and quiet.

Until a door banged open somewhere and he instinctively reacted only to groan and fall back when every nerve in his body told him it had been an incredibly bad idea to move at all.

"Danny?" someone shouted. It felt like the yell bruised his skull by the time it finished reverberating throughout the building.

He opened his mouth to reply but it was so dry he was barely able to croak out much until he cleared his throat to try again. But the effort left him in so much pain that he pressed both hands to his temples to ease some of the pressure and he almost didn't hear his name being shouted a second time.

"Here!" he managed and the person must have heard him because footsteps came rushing toward him and before he could issue any warning about how much his head hurt, someone was shaking him and repeating his name worriedly.

"Danny, man, talk to me, are you okay? What happened?" Tucker asked frantically.

Danny groaned.

"Oh man," Tucker moaned. "This is not good, not good, oh man, this is so bad, okay, talk to me, Danny, where does it hurt? Are you okay? Can you get out of here?"

"Quiet," Danny breathed as he turned in on himself. "Hurts," he added.

"Oh, okay," Tucker nodded as he turned the volume down to speak at a stage whisper. "I can be quiet, I can do that. Don't want any ghosts hearing us anyway." He started to reach forward before he thought better of it. "What hurts?"

"Everything," Danny muttered.

"Well, I don't see any blood," Tucker said. "I guess that's something, anyway. Can you move? Can you walk? Can we get out of here?" He cast a glance over his shoulder as if he expected a ghost to show up at any minute.

"Dunno," Danny admitted. "Haven't really tried to move yet." He sighed. "Help me up?" he asked as if it were the last thing he actually wanted to do.

"Sure thing," Tucker grunted as he did most of the work getting Danny to a sitting position.

The half-ghost swayed in place and tried not to think that his head might tip over and fall off at any moment.

"You good?"

Danny debated whether it would hurt less to nod or to speak, so he settled with a sort of grunt.

"Gotcha. Okay, let's get out of this place."

Danny looked over at the door which suddenly seemed very far away. He grimaced. Getting there would not be fun. And that was only the first step to this escape plan.

"Where are we, anyway?" he asked.

Tucker looked at him in surprise. "Abandoned warehouse on the water, just outside of town. You don't remember getting here?"

Danny pinned him with a stare. As if he would be asking if he remembered where he was and how he'd gotten there.

"Right, stupid question."

"How'd you even find me?" he asked, passing a hand over his forehead.

Tucker pulled his PDA out of one of his pockets and waved it. "Followed your cell phone signal here. It was the weirdest thing, though. Thing activated a tracer on you automatically. I didn't push anything. I didn't even know you weren't home and I had to go looking for you."

"But… how…?"

"Don't ask me, man. Someone must have known you were here and put it on. Don't know why they couldn't have just gotten you home themselves. Or who would have done it. Not like whoever beat you up like this would call for a rescue team, would they?"

Tucker leaned in to examine his friend closer. Beyond the bruises along the side of his head that he almost expected to see, there were deep creased bags under Danny's eyes, which were bloodshot. And he could smell the sharp tang of what he thought might be dried ectoplasm. "You really look awful, dude. You sure you're okay to get going?"

Danny gritted his teeth. He'd somehow made it home on his own steam with worse injuries than this. It would be painful, but he could deal with that. He would just have to, wouldn't he?

"Yeah," he said tersely, bracing himself for more movement.

"Good," Tucker replied. "Then let's blow this place. Doesn't look like this party was ever much fun," he said with a final glance at the carnage of the room's contents scattered brokenly across the floor.

Danny froze, eyes unfocusing as he stared at the wall.

Tucker began to panic after he didn't respond to his name or snapping in front of his face. He started poking him in the shoulder. "Danny? Danny, come on, what is it? Snap out of it. Talk to me!"

Then Danny looked him straight in the eye and began to laugh.

Tucker looked at him warily, unsure of how to handle this new development. "Dude, what's going on? You're scaring me…"

But Danny couldn't reply, too caught up in his laughter that his stomach hurt. When he finally looked over and saw his friend's face, though, he tried to calm down and tell him what was going on. "Dude, it's okay…" he laughed, trying to pat Tucker on the shoulder and missing.

"It's okay?" Tucker parroted. "I don't think this is okay. I think we need to get you out of here fast. Before we get some trouble of the ghostly kind."

"There… there won't be any… aha… any trouble… not ghost trouble…"

"No ghost trouble?" he asked skeptically. "And how can you be so sure of that?"

"Because… I remember… ow. Owowowowowwwww," he suddenly stopped laughing and cradled his throbbing head until the pounding receded.

"You remember what?" Tucker prompted.

"What happened."

"Yeah? And what was that?"

"Well firs', Ember was using me as a piñata." Tucker looked at him in alarm. "Then Skulker came and then everybody else showed up." Tucker's eyes widened even further. "It was a party," Danny concluded as he looked up with a loopy grin on his face.

"Excuse me?"

"Ghost party," he elaborated with a far-off look. "Lights and music and the… the whole shebang. And they… ahahaha… they killed me."

"What?!" Tucker grabbed Danny's shoulders with both his hands, trying to reassure himself that they were still solid.

"No…" Danny trailed off with a frown as he corrected himself. "Nononono, that's not it. They didn't kill me. They… they wasted me."

Tucker shook his head and opened his mouth to try to formulate a question when Danny continued with a happily lazy, "I… am so… wasted…" He chuckled softly to himself and then cringed when it made his head hurt again. He covered his face with both his hands and tried to face plant on the sofa again, but Tucker's hand held him up. He groaned.

"Wait," Tucker said, heartbeat finally slowing down to a reasonable pace as he figured out what Danny had said. "You mean to tell me that you weren't beat up by ghosts all night. You are actually partying. And you're not about to die, you're actually really literally wasted."

Danny smiled absently in response before dropping all vestiges of expression and trying to fall back down on the soft cushions. Tucker let him this time.

"And it was actually just a party? And we're not in any danger?"

"Speak for yourself. I think my head's about to split open…" Danny mumbled from beneath his arm. "Shouldn't have listened to Technus; that purple stuff tasted terrible…"

"Dude…" Tucker began before shaking his head. "Ghost party. Dude, that is so…" he trailed off, hardly believing what this room must have looked like the previous night before realizing that he probably really didn't want to be able to picture it. "Let's get out of here, okay?"

At Danny's huff of assent, he pulled him upright and wrapped one arm around his shoulders, guiding his pliant wobbly form toward the door.

"Let's get you home…"


End file.
